Building Instrument

It happens only rarely that musicians working with improvisation at the sharp end of experimental practice are so attuned to contemporary style and taste that their work reaches beyond “the serious” or “the popular” to come out the other side sounding like a genuinely new form resonating on both levels simultaneously. Building Instrument– the Bergen-based trio – are such a group.

The trio has excisted for more than 10 years, and their music still comprises a mixture of freely improvised parts and other compositions and arrangements done in close collaboration by the three. The lyrics are written in a mix of Brunvoll’s native Norwegian dialect and her own made-up words.

The final product is stitched together from the materials available to form a seamless musical tapestry that feels distinctively hand-crafted. This humble, hand-made aesthetic fits the band like a glove, and connects them to a kind of international informal movement of artists working with advanced technology yet retaining a home-made style and ethos that can feel more analogue than digital, more human than machine. The same feeling can be detected in the beautiful animated film created by the Dutch video artist Simone Hooymans for the track ‘Rett Ned’ from Building Instrument’s second Hubro album, ‘Kem Som Kan Å Leve’.